Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
There is a real, delicate art to the bait-and-switch premiere. You basically have to sell the audience on two different premises, and you have to sell them on the second one hard enough that they don’t mind that you’re not really doing the first (or at least aren’t doing it the way they thought you would). Also, if you’re really committed to the bit, most or all of your pre-release marketing is going to be about the first premise. So you’re trying to catch fish with the wrong type of worm, essentially, and making it that much harder on yourself in the process.
Accordingly, anime that take this kind of swing are a bit rare. The most recent example I can think of is last year’s Bang Bravern, and its two conceits are closely enough related that I can’t imagine too many people were majorly disappointed when it turned out to be a super robot show instead of a gritty real robot show.
Turkey! Time to Strike was presented in its early marketing materials as a simple show about bowling. This is a valid niche within the “girls doing stuff” supergenre of anime, for sure, and it comes to us from Bakken Record, a studio whose main prior credit of note is Ippon! Again, also a show about a girls’ sport club—judo in the case of that series—so this seemed like a perfectly logical next step. No one had any real reason to believe this was anything but a straightforward drama (or comedy, or maybe both) about a girls’ bowling league.
In its opening minutes, that’s exactly what it is. We open on our heroines flubbing the opening match of a tournament, as our lead Otonashi Mai [Hishikawa Hana] gets a snake-eye split on her final ball and washes her team out of the match. Tensions run high afterward, with the serious and competitive Godai Rina [Ichinose Kana] accusing her of throwing the match deliberately. Rina has quite a lot to say to her other teammates, too, pointing the finger at Mitaka Nozomi [Tenma Yuuki] for doing her makeup and not taking the game seriously while it went on, Ichinose Sayuri [Iwata Haruki] for constantly throwing gutter balls because she tenses up so bad, and the nerdy Nikaidou Nanase [Itou Ayasa] she simply calls a benchwarmer.
As this argument drags on, it comes out that Nozomi and Sayuri only joined in the first place because Mai asked them to, and Nanase only joined because she thought the experience might “help her in the future” in some way. Upset with all of this, Rina quits the club. Mai reassures the others that she’ll talk to Rina at school the following day, since she doesn’t want the club to be disbanded for lack of membership. There’s some nice camera work here where Mai takes her ramune—this entire dispute started in the first place because the club bought a round of “celebratory” sodas despite losing—and drinks from it, the marble inside rolling around like a bowling ball as the camera fixes on it. So far, so sports drama.
On their way home, the remains of the bowling club spot a construction site where a pit is being dug. They remark that there was a secondhand book shop there just two days prior, and one of the girls muses that it takes only an instant to lose something. For whatever reason, this really gets to Mai, and she decides she has to reconcile with Rina right now. Thus invigorated, she and the rest of the bowling club make their way to the alley again to try to patch things up with her. Rina’s not terribly impressed by Mai’s pleas, but she offers a simple ultimatum: if Mai can beat her in a bowling match, she’ll at least think about coming back.
Thus, we get a nice setpiece of the two going head to head, one on one, the bowling balls thundering down the lane as a downpour breaks out outside. It’s honestly pretty solid, and you can see the kind of show that Turkey could easily have decided to be on display here. This sort of thing, the idea that the best way to understand someone, to get through to them, is to take them on in your shared field of competition, is very common in sports anime and fiction about athletics in general. It’s good stuff, and Turkey sells it well.
On the last frame, Mai throws a split again, and Rina storms off, assuming she’s doing this on purpose and that Rina’s being mocked. But Mai won’t give up, and she throws her second ball right as a bolt of lightning strikes a mysterious artefact dug up from the construction site outside. At that very moment, Turkey stops being a sports anime, and becomes something else entirely.
And that’s the end of the episode!
Seriously!
What utter goofball shit! What chutzpah! Why would you make a show like this?! Turkey, whose English-market subtitle Time to Strike suddenly makes a lot more sense, opens itself up to both barrels here. If you’re here for the sports drama stuff, the ending is going to throw you for a complete loop. If you heard about the twist beforehand and wanted the show to get to that, you have to get through a whole episode of teenagers arguing about fucking bowling first. So on the surface, this seems like a terrible idea. And yet, to me at least, this speaks to an unshakeable confidence in this story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Turkey is going to turn out to be some kind of masterpiece, or even be particularly good overall, but come on! How can you not love that?
Even so, I do think the show has a good command of its own strengths. There’s a strong web of character dynamics underpinning this episode that works equally well for both the “sports drama” premise and the “stranded in the past” premise, and I think that’s going to be the secret sauce that ties the whole thing together. Even if it doesn’t, when you pivot from a bowling club to time travel in your first episode, I can only wonder what the hell else you have in store. Thus, Turkey is a representation of probably my single favorite thing about anime, its endless capacity for surprise. None of us know where this is going, but the second trailer for the series, released after the premiere dropped, provides a hint.
Where we’re going, we don’t need lanes to bowl.
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